Tag: 10 things

june 11/RUN

5.3 miles
ford loop
65 degrees / steady drizzle

Thought the rain wasn’t coming until later today so I got ready for my run — changed into my running clothes, stretched, put on my running shoes — then opened the door to drizzle. Decided to go anyway. At first, it was intermittent drizzle, but halfway through it became a steady, soft rain. Not enough to soak my shorts but enough to cool me off and to inspire a chant:

drip drip drop
drop
drip drip drip
drop

drop drip
drop drip
drop drip
drip drop

drip drip drip
drop drop drop

drop drop drip
drop drop drip
drop drop drip
drip

I continued my 9 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking plan and was successful. In the last mile, my left started to hurt a little, then my left calf, and my foot. It’s fine, but to be safe, I stopped at 5.3 miles. The run was never easy, but it also wasn’t hard to keep going, knowing that I had a walk break coming.

10 Things

  1. a soft green everywhere
  2. an empty river
  3. new trees wrapped in plastic looking like wild turkeys
  4. a dark tunnel of green with a bright circle of white at the end
  5. on your left / thank you!
  6. front yard tree with a giant boulder just in front of it
  7. empty benches except for the one near folwell: 2 people not sitting, but standing behind it
  8. the rumble of planes sounding like thunder
  9. the sharp clang of a mailbox lid falling shut
  10. chains from a trailer rattling and scraping on the rough road

green haze: Running on the east river road, quick glances over to the gorge — a soft green and silver view of trees and sky

I was delighted to discover halfway in that the poem-of-the-day on the Poetry Foundation is about rust! The entire poem is wonderful, but it’s long, so I’ll only post most of the rust part:

excerpt from “Que Sera Sera”/ A. Van Jordan

Like when a song gets so far out
on a solo you almost don’t recognize it,
but then you get back to the hook, you suddenly

recognize the tune and before you know it,
you’re putting your hands together; you’re on your feet—
because you recognize a sound, like a light,
leading you back home to a color:

rust. You must remember
rust—not too red, not too orange—not fire or overnight
change, but a simmering-summer
change in which children play till they tire

and grown folks sit till they grow edgy
or neighborhood dogs bite those not from your neigborhood
and someone with some sense says Down, Boy,
or you hope someone has some sense

who’s outside or who owns the dog and then the sky
turns rust and the streetlights buzz on
and someone’s mother, must be yours, says
You see those streetlights on don’t you,

and then everybody else’s mother comes out and says
the same thing and the sky is rust so you know
you got about ten minutes before she comes back out
and embarrasses you in front of your friends;

ten minutes to get home before you eat and watch
the Flip Wilson Show or Sanford and Son and it’s time for bed.
And it’s rust you need to remember
when the cop asks, What kind of work you do?

It’s rust you need to remember: the smell
of summer rain on the sidewalk
and the patina on wrought-iron railings on your front porch
with rust patches on them, and the smell

of fresh mowed grass and gasoline and sweat
of your childhood as he takes a step back
when you tell him you’re a poet teaching
English down the road at the college,

when he takes a step back—
to assure you, know, that this has nothing to do with race,
but the rust of a community he believes
he keeps safe, and he says Have a Good One,

meaning day as he swaggers back to his car,
and the color of the day and the face behind sunglasses
and the hands on his hips you’ll always remember
come back gunmetal gray

for the rest of this rusty afternoon.

Rust — I’ve been wanting to write a poem about rust for some time. Is this a sign that I should try today?

june 10/RUNSWIM

4.5 miles
veterans home
59 degrees
poor air quality

The smoke from Canadian wild fires didn’t bother me much, although the inside of my nose was coated with something which made breathing a little more difficult. Other than that, it was a nice morning for a run. More shade than sun, low wind. Another 9/1 success. I’m continuing to build up the mental strength — a belief that I can keep going. Chanting in triple berries helped: strawberry raspberry blueberry.

Yesterday I mentioned possibly focusing on benches as a monthly theme — or a 1 or 2 week theme? As I ran south, I made note of a few of the benches.

9 Benches

  1. near the worn wooden steps leading to the winchell trail — wooden slats — empty
  2. at the top of a mulched trail descending into the oak savanna — a worn boulder that looks and acts as a bench — someone was standing there today, writing something on a piece of paper
  3. above the 38th street steps — wooden slats — empty
  4. beside a boulder in a part of the walking path that splits from the bike path — wooden slats — empty
  5. in a patch of grass above the “edge of the world” — wooden slats — empty
  6. on the edge of the 44th street parking lot — wooden slats — occupied by a bike/biker
  7. near John Stevens house and a cluster of picnic tables — wooden slats — empty
  8. at the bus stop across from the veterans home — green metal back/wooden slat seat — empty
  9. above the locks and dam no. 1 — green metal back/wooden slat seat — empty

Other things noticed: 4 or 5 turkeys in the grassy boulevard, a group of 8-10 roller skiers, the roar of the falls through the trees, a human with 2 dogs trotting to the creek bank, the light rail horn blasting a warning, the sweet/sour smell of earth on the hill descending below the ford bridge, headlights from a bobcat below me in the woods — I think they’re building a new walking path that goes deeper into the gorge!

For the first 3 miles, I listened to voices and wheels and the echo of a dog’s bark. For the last 1.5 miles, my color playlist.

still life

In the middle of the night, during one of several bouts of restlessness, I started reading a book I got from the library: Still Life/ Jay Hopler. Why did I request this book? It must have been because of the title and my interest in the word, still, and still life paintings. Reading more about it, I discovered this:

When Jay Hopler was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer and told he only had two years left to live, he chose to spend his time writing this book: a rare gift to our world in all its ways. The book seems to be both a representation of all the moving parts of the dying, as well as an antithesis to how we usually converse about death, namely a dying person.

Still Life review

still life w/ wet gems/ Jay Hopler

lightnings bang their jaggeds on the cloud-glower
the cloud-glower is a broken necklace spilling its wet gems
its wet gems w/ facets cut uncountable
uncountable the reflections of the world in those gems
uncountable the version of the world into its dry self crashing
the shards of those worlds like shrapnel blasting skyward
slicing skyward or sidewise through the dune grass
the dune grass flattened by that splatter even as i write
the words

To My Wife on Our Anniversary/ Jay Hopler

In Castiglione del Lago, the pines are iron-spined. When the wind
blows, they stand still & the earth sways. If only God had forged me thus!
Forced into a stooped form & told to straighten up, that’s as far as His
blessings ever extended in my direction. You know what keeps me from
falling apart? Luck & duct tape. Even so, those trees have nothing on me.
Blessed as they are, all they get to hold today is a sick man’s attention &,
maybe, a few birds.

After reading still life w/ wet gems last night, I thought about my “how I see” project and the idea of writing around landscape and still life paintings — maybe portraits, too?

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
81 degrees
water temp: 68 degrees

Open swim! Open swim! Open swim! There aren’t enough exclamation points to convey my joy over another summer of swimming across the lake. I swam 2 loops without stopping at the beach in-between. It felt good and then it didn’t and then it did again. Sore arms, the strange feeling of muscles not worked for a year waking up again. Now, a warm buzz. With no access to a pool, I haven’t swum since last august, so I’m impressed that I did as much as I did. I didn’t worry about not seeing the buoys, even when I couldn’t. Just kept swimming and reached them. Hooray for swimming without seeing (much)! Hooray for Minneapolis Parks for keeping open swim the same! Hooray for my muscles and tendons and lungs enabling me to do this thing I love!

The water was a deep green-blue. I could see the milfoil reaching up from the bottom, looking ghostly. Also saw pale legs kicking in front of me. No fish, no dragonflies, no menacing swans.

june 7/RUN

3 miles
trestle turn around
70 degrees

Wow, summer! Sunny, not too warm. Strong legs, mental toughness. A good morning to be outside and moving. Heard the rowers and a roller skier, someone blasting an old rock song — what was it? I remember identifying it and thinking that I needed to try and remember the title, but now I can’t. Encountered lots of bikers and walkers and runners, but no turkeys or squirrels or lunging dogs.

10 Things

  1. siren
  2. coxswain
  3. hearing the glittering of trees
  4. click (ity clack)
  5. bugs
  6. headphone fail
  7. pack(ed)
  8. radio
  9. fragment (overheard)
  10. concealed

A police siren that I thought was a loon, the coxswain’s voice calling out instructions, a breeze passing through the leaves and hearing the glittering of trees. The click of roller skier’s poles striking the ground, an itchy bite from a bug. Turning on my “Doin’ Time” playlist, expecting to hear the music in my ears, instead hearing it all around — a headphone fail. Someone blasting music from a radio. A fragment of a conversation overheard, the words now forgotten. The river, the rowers, the ground below, concealed by a wall of green.

Walking back, after I was done, I heard a Dad reading to his son about a baby bird in a tree. Very sweet. It almost sounded like, are you my mother? Was it?

Finished reading through Hardly Creatures for the first — but not the last — time. Their playing around with what access means is fascinating. I’m thinking about my ekphrastic/alt-text project and how access might work in it. In my next read through of the book, I’ll think about access and what it means to me and take notes on the different ways Colgate practices/invokes/addresses it.

june 6/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls
65 degrees / dew point: 55

At first it felt cool, pleasant, but after a few minutes, heavy, warm. Slept in until 8 and then waited too long to go out — around 10:30. Oh well, a good run anyway. Another 9/1 with a pause at the halfway point for a bathroom break at the falls.

10 Things

  1. flushed
  2. bright yellow vest
  3. green
  4. turkey!
  5. busker
  6. accordian
  7. workers
  8. a kid losing their shit
  9. I’m a Barbie Girl
  10. thick

Flushed face, flushed toilet at the falls. Voices below me, then 2 people in bright yellow vests discussing where to start doing whatever they were doing — trimming trees? pulling buckthorn? Green green green everywhere — no blue sky, just a green one. A turkey beside the path! Then more turkeys all around. A busker at the falls, playing an acordian. Workers at the falls, workers, at the Horace Cleveland Overlook. Daddy! Daddy! It’s THIS way! Daddy! — a kid losing his shit near the parking lot. Seen not heard — a little, high voice signing, I’m a Barbie girl. By the end of the run, the air felt and looked thick.

Listened to chainsaws and scattered voices as I ran south. Put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist heading back north.

While drinking my coffee and scrolling through Instagram, I read about how a favorite running podcaster’s cancer has returned: stage 4 metastatic bone cancer. Other than her podcast and instagram posts, I don’t know her, but I know she has a beautiful 5 year old daughter and I am sad.

Hardly Creatures

What a book! Rob Macaisa Colgate has such a compelling, beautiful voice. Here’s the title poem:

Hardly Creatures/Rob Macaisa Colgate

“A healed femur”

      —Margaret Mead, anthropologist, on the first evidence of human civilization

The digital tour guide tells us how we are animals
as if we don’t already know, as if sleep is a game
we play, as if hunger is incidental every day at lunch.
We enter a virtual room with an improbable flock

of birds suspended at eye level, a hundred
species flying together. The guide tells us about
a bonded pair of male crows, how when one
lost his lower mandible to a crashed window

the other began to forage for them both, chewing up
seeds and worms and pushing the bolus
down his partner’s throat. In another room
we pivot the camera angle and see a hill country creek

running beneath our feet under thick clear plastic.
We learn how the blind salamander compensates
for its lack of eyesight with advanced sensitivity
to changes in water pressure, sweeping its lonely head

back and forth to detect small aquatic invertebrates—
We creatures have always found a way,
the recording chuckles. We have, I think,
though this should not mean that we must.

We pause the tour for Rosie to rest with her camera off.
I wish the guide would stop calling humans creatures, she says.
We’re hardly creatures, the way we love each other.
I nod, but can’t stop thinking about the crows

that love each other, the salamander that loves itself,
the crows that only know caregiving, the salamander
that only knows survival, every creature forever feeding
whatever mouth is in front of them

either born knowing how to love
or picking it up down the line.

Question: Is Ross suggesting that we love more/better than “creatures” or less? Are they challenging the narrator’s assessment or reinforcing it? I can’t decide.

every creature forever feeding/whatever mouth is in front of them — what a beautiful line and idea

june 5/RUN

5.45 miles
franklin loop
60 degrees

Another 9/1 successfully done! Left the house by 8, so it was cool. I wasn’t sure which way I would run until my feet turned to the left and I was heading for the franklin bridge. Went by the welcoming oaks, through the tunnel of trees, above the floodplain forest, below the road. Deep in the trees, I felt a truck rumbling by. Near the rowing club, I thought I heard some rowers below me. The bridge was backed up and thick with cars, so was the east river road. A line up of 25 or 30 or more cars. Like I usually do, I wondered if these cars were watching me and if they wished they could be outside on a run instead of cooped up in a car. Running across the lake street bridge, I looked for boats in the water, but it was empty.

A thought mid-run: Instead of trying to notice anything particular, why not stop noticing or thinking and just be. Of course right after that, I started listening to the birds and then the cars and then the voices of other walkers.

10 Things

  1. rustling
  2. sprinkling
  3. hovering
  4. green
  5. rowers
  6. flat
  7. traffic back-up
  8. back pack
  9. construction cone
  10. whirring

Yesterday I picked up Hardly Creatures at Moon Palace Books. I’m very excited to start it today!

An hour later: I’m reading Hardly Creatures. Wow! I feel like I need to read through the whole collection, then read through several more times and think about all that Rob Macalisa Colgate is doing in this book with accessibility. It’s in the content and the form. He’s writing about his experiences with (in) accessibility, but also offering different ways to access the stories, the words, the ideas in this collection.

So far, I’m struck by the opening to each section:

Access Check-In

There is no right way to end
the sickness,
to stomach it.
A reasonable
failure to care for yourself like a child. No
body
is useless.

page 19
page 21
page 23
page 24
page 27

page 29
page 31

And what made me stop and decide to write about the book, were these lines in the poem, “Ward”:

Window:




Form:

what allows you to see out
what separates you from what you see
your only chance

a body
a set of rules
a set of empty spaces to fill out at the front desk

june 4/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
67 degrees

Another successful 9/1 run, where success = picking something and committing to it and keeping steady and relaxed. Yesterday it rained most of the day, so no running. Evn if it hadn’t been raining, I wouldn’t/couldn’t have fun; smoke from the Canadian wild fires made the air quality terrible. Not just hazy; I could smell/feel the smoke. Today it’s much better.

9 Things

  1. mowing
  2. sweating
  3. bugs
  4. shadows
  5. voices
  6. laughter
  7. crowds
  8. cars
  9. potholes

I tried something new today with the 10 things. At the end of my run, I pulled out my phone and recorded a list of things. I ended up with nine because I forgot to count as I was doing it. By the end, I wasn’t sure of how many things I had listed.

On Monday, we moved RJP into her new apartment. She handled the stress of moving very well. What a difference a year makes!

Here’s another bit from Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses I’d like to remember:

from Tall Flatsedge Notebook/ Brian Teare

A guidebook calls it “tall Flatsedge” but at my desk
it doesn’t stick : each sketched notebook detail floats
slowly from what once had make it live. At its smallest
:matter has no ideals” : taking off my socks, I find
several flatsedge seeds hooked : no split of self
from self—it can’t lack—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen—
it’s being & being singly is. All day at Chimney Rock
I’d returned to three thoughts :

you; the “world

we wanted to go out into,
to come to ourselves into”;

& the right form
to bridge two subjects apart

“organizations in the sound of them
verg[e] upon meaning,
upon ‘Heaven;”

As part of this section, Teare includes sources for these ideas in the left margins. I fiddled around with columns to add them in, but I wasn’t able to. Maggie Nelson did a similar thing with sources in The Argonauts. And Alice Oswald does it in Dart to identify the “voice” that is speaking in the poem. I’d like to experiment with this in a piece involving my notes for a gorge run.

I also like his discussion of bridging the gap between two subjects — you and the world. Here I’m thinking of the you and the I, too.

june 2/RUN

2.25 miles
2 trails
70 degrees

14 years ago today, I started running. I wanted to mark the occasion with a longer run, but it’s warm and I don’t have time. This morning we move RJP into her first apartment. It’s difficult to put into words how I’m feeling. I will miss her being here, but I’m not sad. I’m excited for her and for me. She’s ready, and I am too.

10 Things

  1. bugs
  2. breeze
  3. drip drip drip
  4. mulching leaves
  5. bird chorus
  6. hazed surface
  7. distanced
  8. shrill
  9. dark green
  10. wood chipped

Something new to try: if I look at this list in a few days, are these words enough to remind me of what I noticed and experienced on this run? Future Sara, let us know!

Discovered this book today, Hardly Creatures. It looks amazing! I found out about through Poetry Daily, which is where I’m finding out about most of my new favorite poets. I think this should be an early birthday present to me! (update: bought it!)

I found out about this book from this interview, which was linked to on Poetry Daily.

I want to remember this part:

The question I asked at the very beginning, before writing many poems from this, was: what would accessible poetry mean, maybe not in the ways that mean “easy to read” or “intelligible,” but as in “meeting the needs of the reader”? How could a poem do everything a poem wants to do, while also meeting the needs of the reader? That questioning drove the whole book, the individual poems themselves, and especially the access symbols. 

JGJ: “Meeting the needs of the reader” is exactly it. I felt like needs I didn’t even know I had were accounted for while reading this collection. Sometimes there’d be a poem that was just the title, and the rest of the page would be blank. Those moments helped me realize that I actually needed to just sit and take the previous poem in, because maybe it had a lot of heavy material, or had a lot happening in it. Those moments give the reader their own authority over the reading experience. One could choose to just sit there in the blank space, or choose to reread the poem, or move on. 

There’s one poem, “History of Display,” that really stuck out to me. While reading, the poem was at once being really guiding and gentle, but didn’t let that tenderness stop it from criticizing the absurdity of our ableist world. How did you learn to strike such a balance in your writing, of making sure to meet the needs of your reader, while also remaining critical?

RMC: I paid a lot of attention to my own experiences reading. I’m not always the best reader… I’m a very tired and sleepy person, and I would sort of pay attention to things like, Okay, how many poems can I get through before I feel like I need to stop? Or, What order of poems is helpful to keep me reading? If while reading I encounter a super dense, lyrical poem on one page, enough to make me think, I hope the next one’s shorter, and then the next one would be just as dense, it would pull me out of the work. I would feel bad about that because it’d be wonderful work, but because my needs weren’t being met, I wasn’t able to give my fullest attention to the work. 

My inclination towards form was very helpful, because it helped to break apart the book into smaller units, poem by poem, and then wing by wing. It was a lot of reading, paying attention to how reading felt, and thinking about what made me feel better when I was reading.

I can’t read a lot of words; it hurts my eyes/brain and I often fall asleep. I’m drawn to shorter forms that I can easily hold in my head. One approach to accessible could be making all the words available in a recording, but I’d rather reduce the number of words altogether!

may 31/RUN

3.5 miles
top of wabun hill and back
67 degrees

Hot! Sunny! It’s summer. Another successful 9 min run/1 min walk session. Building up discipline. I wasn’t sure what my route would be; I just went where my feet lead me, which was halfway down the hill at Locks and Dam no. 1, then all the way up the hill to Wabun park. At the top, I turned around and descended to the parking lot, then to the river road trail heading north.

10 Things

  1. goose
  2. beard
  3. sliver
  4. hiking poles
  5. twang
  6. braid
  7. bench
  8. LOUD!
  9. trail
  10. chartreuse

A honk, then a big shadow on the path in front of me. A goose flying overhead!

At the top of the Wabun hill, a guy in a wheelchair, at an angle, looking down at the river. His white beard glowed in the sunlight.

Remembered to look for the river. Only saw a sliver of it through the tree.

Running up the hill at the locks and dam, passing by 2 people powering up the hill, using hiking poles.

A car — or was it a bike? — blasting country music. Not sure who or what it was. All I could hear was twang.

Approaching then passing another runner from behind, noticing her long, white braid. I couldn’t quite hear, but I think she called out, good job!

A bench facing a wall of green. Someone was sitting on it, taking in the green view.

A mini peloton of 30 or so riders on the road. Their whirring wheels were so LOUD!

Running down the short stretch of the path that dips below the road, I noticed a steep trail descending to the river. I’d like to take it some day.

Seen on the wabun hill: a walker wearing chartreuse shorts.

I did it. I struggled to come up with 10 things. Maybe because it was a shorter run or because I was hot or because not much was happening on the trail this morning. No — not that last one. There’s always something happening on or near the trail!

may 26/RUN

4.6 miles
veterans home
63 degrees

Ran to the falls. Every day, my legs are feeling stronger. Will I be ready to run almost 8 miles next week? Yes! I listened to all the walkers and bikers and roller skiers and runners out by the gorge as I ran south, my “color” playlist as I ran north. I stopped a few times to record some ideas about my blue poem. Yesterday was indigo, today it’s blue.

10 Things

  1. roots
  2. sky
  3. roar
  4. flags
  5. voices
  6. bikers
  7. Sawyer
  8. horns
  9. picnic
  10. honks

Near the end of my run, I ran on the grassy boulevard between the river road and edmund. There were a lot of them, but I managed to not trip over any of the roots popping out of the dry dirt.

The sky was a cloudless blue, sometimes bright, sometimes pale.

At the park, I didn’t run near the falls, but I could still hear its roar as it rushed over the edge.

Memorial Day. At the Veterans home, the road was lined with flags.

Crossing over the creek on the high bridge, I could hear kids’ voices below, laughing and calling out to each other. I couldn’t hear any splashing, but I could tell by their tone that they were in the water.

The path was thick with fast moving bikers.

No — Sawyer — no! Two adults called out to their toddler when he tried to follow me as I ran by.

Running down the steep hill near locks and dam no. 1, I heard horns on the ford bridge. Was it in support of memorial day? Against a war or a dictator? (update, minutes later: Scott ran too. He saw someone walking through the park with a sign that read, Democracy dies in silence.)

At Wabun, a dozen or more people were having a picnic under one of the pavilions.

About a mile into my run, a cacophony above the trees. Geese! I followed their honks up into the sky and witnessed a wedge heading north.

blue

Today, I’m thinking about blue and trying to write a sonnet about it. As I ran, some ideas flashed in my head, so I stopped to record them:

after mile 1: inspired by the cacophony of honking geese, I thought about blue as an action, a verb, a phenomenon, not a noun or a pigment. Also: unfenced water, scattered sky.

after mile 2: Thinking about me as blue — as sparkling and shimmering and scattering and flinging waves of light all around. Blue as a happening that is not solid or tangible but imagined, a trick of the light, a “real” that we create for ourselves out of desire. Blue cannot capture the color, the feeling, the happening that blue is.

after finishing the run: The blue sky is not smooth or seamless. I see the scattering, the static, the pixels — the veil that hides the illusion of sight and seeing color, has been lifted.

Searching through my archive for thoughts about blue, I came across this fact, which inspired my thinking about scattering:

Like all other blue birds, Indigo Buntings lack blue pigment. Their jewel-like color comes instead from microscopic structures in the feathers that refract and reflect blue light, much like the airborne particles that cause the sky to look blue.

All About Birds

may 25/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
63 degrees

Felt good today. Ran a little faster, felt a little freer. Even though the weather is great, it’s Sunday, and it’s almost noon, the paths weren’t that crowded. Was it because it’s memorial day weekend? Whatever the reason, I appreciate not having to dodge bikers or groups of walkers.

10 Things

  1. sea
  2. stacked
  3. stink
  4. staring
  5. shadows
  6. craters
  7. purple
  8. soft
  9. sitting
  10. saw

Running through the tunnel of trees above the floodplain forest, a sea of green. No sky or river or solid ground.

4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder.

Above the rowing club, a slight stink from the sewers — sweet and sour.

Running up the hill, past the old stone steps, 2 walkers and a dog about to descend the old stone steps. I couldn’t see their faces, but I felt like they were staring at me.

At the start of my run, bird shadows: a big one swooping, several smaller ones shooting across the street like bullets.

The craters in the patched crack near the trestle seem to be growing deeper.

Running past a tree, a flash of purple in the otherwise green leaves. Was that a trick of the light?

The soft sound of water falling or wind gently rustling the leaves near the ravine.

I was planning to stop at the sliding bench, but 2 people were already sitting there.

Before I began running, I heard a woman’s voice — you did it! Then the sound of a saw buzzing, then good job! Her tone sounded like she was praising a little kid. I wondered if that were true and how old the kid was that she was teaching to use a power saw — not in judgment, in wonder.

indigo

I have returned to my color poems. Before I ran, I was thinking about indigo again. During the run, an idea popped in my head, so just past the trestle I stopped to record it:

Thinking about indigo and idea of wanting this time, at night, that is dark without stars. Which is referencing how, when I lose all of my cone cells, there may never be true dark. And then thinking also about how true dark is not possible (in the city) because of light pollution. The idea that indigo is something both wished for and feared.

another grass line

It will soon be cold here,
and dark here;
the grass will lie flat
to search for its spring head.
(Love in the Weather’s Bells/ Jay Wright)